Monday, February 26, 2018

The NY Times reports on a themed issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, in that many animals have impressive built-in numerosity ability: being able to distinguish between quantities between one and five, say, or proportionally in how 25 is different than 30. In some cases, better than humans: monkeys can visually identify certain number sequences in a split-second.

Scientists
have found that animals across the evolutionary spectrum have a keen
sense of quantity, able to distinguish not just bigger from smaller or
more from less, but two from four, four from ten, forty from sixty.

Orb-weaving
spiders, for example, keep a tally of how many silk-wrapped prey items
are stashed in the “larder” segment of their web. When scientists
experimentally remove the cache, the spiders will spend time searching
for the stolen goods in proportion to how many separate items had been
taken, rather than how big the total prey mass might have been.

Small
fish benefit from living in schools, and the more numerous the group,
the statistically better a fish’s odds of escaping predation. As a
result, many shoaling fish are excellent appraisers of relative head counts.

Guppies,
for example, have a so-called contrast ratio of .8, which means they
can distinguish at a glance between four guppies and five, or eight
guppies and ten, and if given the chance will swim toward the slightly
fishier crowd.

Three-spined
sticklebacks are more discriminating still: with a contrast ratio of
.86, they’re able to tell six fellow fish from seven, or 18 from 21 — a
comparative power that many birds, mammals and even humans might find
hard to beat.

Monday, February 19, 2018

From 2013, an article by a professional journalist, who thankfully skipped any math in college -- then when he went for an MBA to understand the business he was in, discovered that calculus was a prerequisite for entry. So he committed to the road from lowest-level K-6 remediation up to calculus.

In our current case, the journalist (and now professor) suggests that this anti-math bias in journalism may actually be a contributing factor to the collapse of the industry -- in that both (a) the present cohort is unable to make sense of quantitative, scientific, or technological stories, which grow ever more essential to the world around us; and (b) they are unable to understand the financial and business case of their industry.

Well, Professors Kimball and Smith, welcome to journalism, where “bad
at math” isn’t just a destructive idea — it’s a badge of honor. It’s
your admission to the club. It’s woven into the very fabric of identity
as a journalist.

And it’s a destructive lie. One I would say most journalists believe.
It’s a lie that may well be a lurking variable in the death of
journalism’s institutions.

Name me a hot growth area in journalism and I’ll show you an area in
desperate need of people who can do a bit of math. Data. Programming.
Visualization. It’s telling that most of the effort now is around
recruiting people from outside journalism to do these things.

But it doesn’t end there. Name me a place where journalism needs
help, and I’ll show you more places where math is a daily need:
analytics, product development, market analysis. All “business side”
jobs, right? Not anymore.

Truth is, “bad at math” was never a good thing in journalism, even
when things like data and analytics weren’t a part of the job. Covering a
city budget? It’s shameful how many newsroom creatures can’t calculate
percent change. Covering sports? It’s embarrassing how many sports
writers dismiss the gigantic leaps forward in data analysis in all
sports as “nerd stuff.”

In short, we’ve created a culture where ignorance of a subject is not only accepted, it’s glorified. Ha ha! Journalists are bad at math! Fire is hot and water is wet too!

Monday, February 12, 2018

A story from 2016 on how in-service elementary-school teachers in Ontario are only about 50% likely to know K-6 math skills such as fractions or percentage calculations. In response, supplementary remedial courses are delivered for these instructors:

Teachers’ math phobia, which faculties of education across North
America view as a “huge problem,” are seen as one factor in Ontario’s
falling student math scores, especially in grade school, where most
teachers have a liberal-arts background and have not studied math since
high school...

Some professors say student teachers are
often in tears when they try to recall their grade-school math, and tell
them they’re grateful for the emergency crash courses.

“I’ve got
some mathematically brilliant teacher candidates, but I’m also working
with some who don’t know how to multiply or divide,” noted professor
Mary Reid of U of T’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE).
“They have no idea what a ‘remainder’ is. They think a remainder of 3
is the same as decimal 3.”